The police use tear gas and stun grenades after minor clashes with protestors in Ferguson, Missouri.

AMD wants to be a "one-stop shop" for PC components, though RAM and SSDs are all totally standard commodity parts that rarely have compatibility trouble. AMD

PC builders mostly think of CPUs and GPUs when they think of AMD, but today the company announced that it's getting into the SSD business. AMD will be partnering with Toshiba-owned OCZ to launch three Radeon R7-branded solid-state drives in 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB capacities. The drives use OCZ's Barefoot 3 controller and Toshiba's A19nm NAND chips, have four-year warranties, and include 3.5-inch drive adapters for desktops and disk cloning software from Acronis to aid with data migration. Additional information and specifications are laid out in the slides below.

AMD

The Radeon drives share many characteristics with other OCZ SSDs.

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The drives start at $99 for the 120GB model, well south of the $1-per-GB line, and the competitive SSD landscape usually pushes prices down a bit from the MSRP (the 240GB and 480GB models go for $164 and $299, respectively). However, AMD's drives will face strong competition from other entrenched competitors. Looking at Amazon shows well-regarded Samsung drives below that price point ($89 for a 120GB Samsung 840 EVO), and prices of older drives from value players like Kingston go even lower ($55 for a 120GB SSDNow V300 drive, $95 for a 240GB model). That's before you consider newer value-focused drives like the Crucial MX100, recently dubbed the best SSD for most people by the Wirecutter, or OCZ's own ARC 100, which uses the same controller and NAND as the Radeon drives, although it has a shorter warranty and lower transfer speeds.

Like the AMD-branded RAM the company introduced a few years back, there's nothing particularly special about these SSDs. They use controllers from an established company and share most of their specifications with other unbranded drives in OCZ's product lineup. OCZ said that the drive uses "a very different firmware that was engineered specifically for this drive," though it's not clear what differences buyers can actually expect to notice.

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Back in 2011, AMD made a rather unexpected move and expanded its Radeon brand to include memory in addition to graphics cards. With today's announcement AMD is adding another member to its Radeon family by releasing Radeon R7 Series SSDs. Similar to AMD memory, AMD is not actually designing or manufacturing the SSDs as the product design and manufacturing is handled by OCZ. In fact, all the customer support is also handled by OCZ, so aside from the AMD logo AMD is not really involved in the product.

Partnering with OCZ makes sense because OCZ's focus with the Barefoot 3 platform has always been gamers and enthusiasts and that is the target group for AMD's R7 SSDs as well. OCZ is a now owned by Toshiba, so OCZ has direct access to NAND with guaranteed supply, whereas fabless OEMs (e.g. Kingston) could face supply issues that might harm AMD. Here's the quick overview, which of course will be essentially the same as certain existing Barefoot 3 products.

AMD Radeon R7 Series SSD Specifications Capacity 120GB 240GB 480GB Controller OCZ Barefoot 3 M00 NAND Toshiba A19nm MLC Sequential Read 550MB/s 550MB/s 550MB/s Sequential Write 470MB/s 530MB/s 530MB/s 4KB Random Read 85K IOPS 95K IOPS 100K IOPS 4KB Random Write 90K IOPS 90K IOPS 90K IOPS Steady-State 4KB Random Write 12K IOPS 20K IOPS 23K IOPS Idle Power 0.6W 0.6W 0.6W Max Power 2.7W 2.7W 2.7W Encryption AES-256 Endurance 30GB/day for 4 years Warranty Four years MSRP $100 $164 $299

The R7 is based on OCZ's own Barefoot 3 controller and it is the same higher clocked M00 version (397MHz) as in the Vector 150. The new ARC 100 and Vertex 460 use the M10 version, which runs at 352MHz instead of 397MHz but is otherwise the same silicon. Performance wise the R7 SSD is very close to Vector 150 with slightly lower random write performance, although random read performance is marginally better in turn.

The biggest difference between the two is endurance as the Vector 150 is rated at 50GB per day for five years (91TB total) while the R7 is rated at 30GB per day for four years (43TB total). The firmware in the R7 is tailored for AMD, although I was told that the customizations are mainly wear-leveling related to increase endurance over the Vertex 460, so there should not be any surprises in performance. The NAND is also different as the R7 utilizes Toshiba's A19nm MLC, but OCZ should be making the switch to A19nm across its whole client SSD lineup soon to cut costs. 

The motivation behind AMD's move is identical to the reason AMD entered the memory market. AMD wants to provide users an "AMD-only" experience by offering as many of the components as possible. Another argument AMD had is that providing more AMD branded products makes it easier for novice PC builders to pick the parts because the buyer does not have to go through the trouble of deciding between dozens of products and making sure the parts are compatible with each other. In addition to providing an easier purchase experience, AMD can also use the R7 SSDs in bundles and promotions, which is definitely more lucrative than using third party components. 

Of course, the ultimate reason behind the move is that SSDs are becoming a mainstream product, and they provide another revenue source for AMD. AMD has not been doing that great financially lately and having an extra low risk revenue source is definitely welcome, even though client SSDs are not exactly a high profit market anymore. Then again, AMD is not investing much into SSDs since development and manufacturing is done by OCZ, so even if Radeon R7 SSD sales end up being low, AMD has no long-term investment to protect. The announced pricing is generally in line with what we're seeing for the existing OCZ Vector 150 products, though mail-in rebates can actually drop the Vector 150 below Radeon R7 SSD levels.

All in all, the R7 will not provide much from a technological standpoint since it uses the same platform we have tested several times, but it will be interesting to see how AMD bundles the R7 with other AMD products. AMD now has an opportunity to provide even more extensive bundles (CPU/APU, GPU, RAM and SSD); all that's left is for AMD to begin offering Radeon branded motherboards, power supplies, and cases to provide the ultimate AMD-only experience. Whether that happens remains to be seen, but AMD is trying an aggressive bundling strategy to increase their desktop CPU sales.

We have samples of the Radeon R7 SSD on the way, so stay tuned for the full review!

The Roku TVs announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January will finally make their way into stores in the next few weeks, according to releases from TCL and Hisense Monday. The TVs range in size from 32 to 55 inches and are close in price to their dumb-TV counterparts with an operating system that's meant to be an antidote to the average TV interface.

The Roku setup of content "channels" like Netflix, YouTube, and Rdio, as well as the customizable home screen, remain largely unchanged in the new sets. Since the TVs have to handle other inputs, the interface also treats other connected devices (a cable set-top box or a console, for instance) as selectable "channels" on the home screen. If the connected devices are powered on, the TV can show a live preview of what is currently playing within the selected channel box.

The Roku TVs will be packaged with a Roku-style remote, which eliminates most of the interface-tweaking buttons found on a standard TV remote. Instead, there are directional buttons that handle menus, which are curated so that the most commonly tweaked settings get the best placement, according to Roku's research. If users dig deeper, they can find the more granular display settings and other features that TV remotes usually let viewers access with a button press.

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Gordon Smith, president and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters and a former US senator from Oregon. Center for the Study of Ethics

On Monday the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) filed a petition asking a federal court to object to the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) rules for an upcoming auction of TV airwaves to cellular providers. Although lawsuits challenging FCC actions are relatively common, if the court sides with the NAB, the 2015 spectrum auction could be delayed, and promises of improvements to cellular networks could prove illusory.

The auction, which was mandated by Congress two years ago, is the first of its kind, and it has TV broadcasters bristling. The FCC has been asking TV stations to give up their airwaves in exchange for a cut of the auction proceeds, at which point participating stations can either go out of business or “channel share,” an arrangement where two stations occupy the same airwaves. Still, vigorous lobbying on behalf of the broadcast industry ensured that all participation in the auction would be voluntary.

In the NAB's lawsuit today, the industry group said that it was unhappy with the protections the FCC had put in place for those TV stations that chose not to participate in the auction. In 2012, Congress ordered that after participating TV stations had relinquished their rights to their airwaves, the commission would reorder the spectrum, being careful to preserve the remaining broadcasters' coverage areas as much as possible. At the time of the congressional order, the FCC had relied on a specific methodology to determine a broadcaster's coverage area, but in June of this year, the FCC switched to another methodology, which the NAB says is unacceptable.

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The BBC's Emmanuel Igunza investigates the role of Kenyan soldiers in World War One

ARM (and its partners) were arguably one of the major causes of the present day smartphone revolution. While AMD and Intel focused on using Moore’s Law to drive higher and higher performing CPUs, ARM and its partners used the same physics to drive integration and lower power. The result was ultimately the ARM11 and Cortex A-series CPU cores that began the revolution and continue to power many smartphones today. With hopes of history repeating itself, ARM is just as focused on building an even smaller, even lower power family of CPU cores under the Cortex M brand.

We’ve talked about ARM’s three major families of CPU cores before: Cortex A (applications processors), Cortex R (real-time processors) and Cortex M (embedded/microcontrollers). Although Cortex A is what we mostly talk about, Cortex M is becoming increasingly important as compute is added to more types of devices.

Wearables are an obvious fit for Cortex M, yet the initial launch of Android Wear devices bucked the trend and implemented Cortex A based SoCs. A big part of that is likely due to the fact that the initial market for an Android Wear device is limited, and thus a custom designed SoC is tough to justify from a financial standpoint (not to mention the hardware requirements of running Android outpace what a Cortex M can offer). Looking a bit earlier in wearable history and you’ll find a good number of Cortex M based designs including the FitBit Force and the Pebble Steel. I figured it’s time to put the Cortex M’s architecture, performance and die area in perspective.

We’re very much in the early days of the evolution of Cortex M. The family itself has five very small members: M0, M0+, M1, M3 and M4. For the purposes of this article we’ll be focusing on everything but Cortex M1. The M1 is quite similar to the M0 but focuses more on FPGA designs.

Before we get too far down the architecture rabbit hole it’s important to provide some perspective. At a tech day earlier this year, ARM presented this data showing Cortex M die area:

By comparison, a 40nm Cortex A9 core would be roughly around 2.5mm^2 range or a single core. ARM originally claimed the Cortex A7 would be around 1/3 - 1/2 of the area of a Cortex A8, and the Cortex A9 is roughly equivalent to the Cortex A8 in terms of die area, putting a Cortex A7 at 0.83mm^2 - 1.25mm^2. In any case, with Cortex M we’re talking about an order of magnitude smaller CPU core sizes.

The Cortex M0 in particular is small enough that SoC designers may end up sprinkling in multiple M0 cores in case they need the functionality later on. With the Cortex M0+ we’re talking about less than a hundredth of a square millimeter in die area, even the tightest budgets can afford a few of these cores.

In fact, entire SoCs based on Cortex M CPU cores can be the size of a single Cortex A core. ARM provided this shot of a Freescale Cortex M0+ design in the dimple of a golf ball:

ARM wouldn’t provide me with comparative power metrics for Cortex M vs. Cortex A series parts, but we do have a general idea about performance:

Estimated Core Performance   ARM Cortex M0/M0+ ARM Cortex M3/M4 ARM11 ARM Cortex A7 ARM Cortex A9 Qualcomm Krait 200 DMIPS/MHz 0.84/0.94 1.25 1.25 1.9 2.5 3.3

In terms of DMIPS/MHz, Cortex M parts can actually approach some pretty decent numbers. A Cortex M4 can offer similar DMIPS/MHz to an ARM11 (an admittedly poor indicator of overall performance). The real performance differences come into play when you look at shipping frequencies, as well as the type of memory interface built around the CPU. Cortex M designs tend to be largely SRAM and NAND based, with no actual DRAM. You'll note that the M3/M4 per clock performance is identical, that's because the bulk of what the M4 adds is in the form of other hardware instructions not measured by Dhrystone performance.

Instruction set compatibility varies depending on the Cortex M model we’re talking about. The M0 and M0+ both implement ARM’s v6-M instruction profile, while the M3 and M4 support ARM’s v7-M. As you go up the family in terms of performance you get access to more instructions (M3 adds hardware divide, M4 adds DSP and FP instructions):

Each Cortex M chip offers a superset of the previous model’s instructions. So a Cortex M3 should theoretically be able to execute code for a Cortex M0+ (but not necessarily vice versa).

You also get support for more interrupts the higher up you go on the Cortex M ladder. The Cortex M0/M0+ designs support up to 32 interrupts, but if you move up to the M3/M4 you get up to 240.

All Cortex M processors have 32-bit memory addressability and the exact same memory map across all designs. ARM’s goal with these chips is to make moving up between designs as painless as possible.

While we’ve spent the past few years moving to out-of-order designs in smartphone CPUs, the entire Cortex M family is made up of very simple, in-order architectures. The pipelines themselves are similarly simplified:

Cortex M0, M3 and M4 all feature 3-stage in-order pipelines, while the M0+ shaves off a stage of the design. In the 3-stage designs there’s an instruction fetch, instruction decode and a single instruction execute stage. In the event the decoder encounters a branch instruction, there’s a speculative instruction fetch that grabs the instruction at the branch target. This way regardless of whether or not the branch is taken, the next instruction is waiting with at most a 1 cycle delay.

These aren’t superscalar designs, there’s only a 1-wide path for instruction flow down the pipeline and not many execution units to exploit. The Cortex M3 and M4 add some more sophisticated units (hardware integer divide in M3, MAC and limited SIMD in M4), but by and large these are simple cores for simple needs.

The range of operating frequencies for these cores is relatively low. ARM typically expects to see Cortex M designs in the 20 - 150MHz range, but the cores are capable of scaling as high as 800MHz (or more) depending on process node. There’s a corresponding increase in power consumption as well, which is why we normally see lower clocked Cortex M designs.

Similar to the Cortex A and R lines, the Cortex M family has a roadmap ahead of it. ARM recently announced a new CPU design center in Taiwan, where Cortex M based cores will be designed. I view the Cortex M line today quite similarly to the early days of the Cortex A family. There’s likely room for a higher performing option in between Cortex M4 and Cortex A7. If/when we get such a thing I feel like we may see the CPU building block necessary for higher performance wearable computing.

Carolla doing his podcast, earlier this month. Adam Carolla

After more than a year of litigation, podcaster and comedian Adam Carolla has reached a cease-fire with the well-known "patent troll" claiming to hold a patent that covers podcasting.

Carolla was sued for patent infringement in January 2013. He responded by fighting back, raising almost $500,000 in a crowd-funded campaign. The parties had a trial set for next month in East Texas.

Personal Audio LLC, the patent company, also sued TV networks CBS, NBC, and Fox over some of their Internet video-on-demand offerings, since it believes its patent covers some types of Internet "episodic content." The TV companies are continuing to litigate.

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Sprint announced new family plans today that provide 20GB of shared data for $100, calling it "double the high-speed data at a lower price than AT&T and Verizon Wireless."

New pricing options have been expected since last week when newly appointed Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure told employees that "When you have a great network, you don’t have to compete on price," according to Light Reading. But, "when your network is behind, unfortunately you have to compete on value and price."

AT&T and Verizon have the fastest and most reliable cellular networks in the US, according to a nationwide test conducted in late 2013. Sprint's network was the slowest among the four major carriers, but it ranked third in reliability, ahead of T-Mobile.

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A new search has begun in Myanmar for the Dhammazedi Bell - said to have fallen into a river near the country's capital in 1608

Ewan McIntosh

As the protests in Ferguson, Missouri over police fatally shooting 19-year-old Mike Brown have raged through the past several nights, more than a few people have noticed how relatively quiet Facebook news feeds have been on the matter. While #Ferguson is a trending hashtag, Zeynep Tufekci pointed out at Medium that news about the violence was, as best, slow to percolate through her own feed, despite people posting liberally about it.

While I've been seeing the same political trending tags, my feed is mundane as usual: a couple is expecting a baby. A recreational softball team won a league championship. A few broader feel-good posts about actor Chris Pratt’s ice-bucket challenge to raise awareness and money for ALS, another friend’s ice-bucket challenge, another friend’s ice-bucket challenge… in fact, way more about ice bucket challenges than Ferguson or any other news-making event. In my news feed organized by top stories over the last day, I get one post about Ferguson. If I set it to organize by "most recent," there are five posts in the last five hours.

Zach Seward of Quartz noted, also anecdotally, that Facebook seems more likely to show videos of of people dumping cold water on their heads in high summer than police officers shooting tear gas at protesters and members of the media. And rightfully so in Facebook’s warped version of reality: people on Facebook may not be so interested in seeing the latter. At least, not if Facebook can’t show them the right angle. But Facebook’s algorithmic approach and the involvement of content sources is starting to come together such that it may soon be able to do exactly that.

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French film director Luc Besson talks about his new science fiction thriller called Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson

Humanitarian aid is being distributed to thousands of Yazidi people who have fled Islamic militants in northern Iraq, but conditions are harsh in refugee camps and many fear they will never be able to return home.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has suggested he will leave the Ecuadorean embassy in London "soon".

Gloucester Docks is converted into a film set for the sequel to Alice in Wonderland.

A group of people from Afghanistan rescued from a shipping container in Essex are claiming asylum in the UK, the Home Office has said.

A red giant star really is quite gigantic compared to our Sun. NASA

Radioactive decay is a powerful tool. The predictable decay of radioactive isotopes can be used for far more than just dating old rocks. Scientists have used radioactive isotopes to determine the age of the Earth and the age of the Solar System itself. Now, a team of scientists has used radioactive dating to study the pre-history of the Solar System more accurately than before, in the process reconciling data that had seemed to be contradictory.

The contradiction came in the form of data from two different isotopes. The radioactive elements iodine-129 and hafnium-182 are found throughout meteoroids in the Solar System. The abundance of those elements, in relation to the abundance of their non-radioactive counterparts, should give estimates of the time when those elements were produced. The problem is that the date calculated from the iodine (~72 million years prior to the Sun’s formation) does not match the date from the hafnium (~15 million years). Since the two elements should have been produced in the same event (typically a supernova), this was quite a problem.

Both these isotopes are produced via a neutron-capture process. Under certain conditions, an atomic nucleus can pick up a loose neutron. While it remains the same element, it ends up being a different isotope with a different atomic weight. There are two known types of neutron-capture processes: the s-process and the r-process.

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HTTP Shaming's ethos is even on a fridge. Tony Webster, HTTP Shaming

The amount of personal data traveling to and from the Internet has exploded, yet many applications and services continue to put user information at risk by not encrypting data sent over wireless networks. Software engineer Tony Webster has a classic solution—shame. 

Webster decided to see if a little public humiliation could convince companies to better secure their customers' information. On Saturday, the consultant created a website, HTTP Shaming, and began posting cases of insecure communications, calling out businesses that send their customers' personal information to the Internet without encrypting it first.

One high-profile example includes well-liked travel-information firm TripIt. TripIt allows users to bring together information on their tickets, flight times, and itinerary and then sync it with other devices and share the information with friends and co-workers. Information shared with calendar applications, however, is not encrypted, Webster says, leaving it open to eavesdropping on public networks. Among the details that could be plucked from the air by anyone on the same wireless network: a user's full name, phone number, e-mail address, the last four digits of a credit card number, and emergency contact information. An attacker could even change or cancel the victim's flight, he says.

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Two Russian cosmonauts set off on a spacewalk from the International Space Station (ISS) to launch a nano-satellite.

Two Russian cosmonauts set off on a spacewalk from the International Space Station (ISS) to launch a nano-satellite.